History’s shorthand has long suggested that the goal of the expedition was to determine whether Asia and North America were connected. In truth, this question had apparently been settled some years before—although both Peter and Bering seem to have been oblivious of that fact. In 1648, Semen Ivanovich Dezhnev, a Siberian cossack, sailed eastward with ninety men in seven small boats from the Kolyma River on the Arctic coast of northeastern Siberia.
